Spartacus, Scientific Robot Reporter

Spartacus, our 2005 AAAI Mobile Robot Challenge entry, integrated planning and scheduling, sound source localization, tracking and separation, message reading, speech recognition and generation, and autonomous navigation capabilities onboard a custom-made interactive robot. Integration of such a high number of capabilities revealed interesting new issues such as coordinating audio/visual/graphical capabilities, monitoring the impacts of the capabilities in usage by the robot, and inferring the robot’s intentions and goals. Our 2006 entry addresses these issues, adding new capabilities to the robot and improving our software and computational architectures, with the objective of increasing and evaluating our understanding of human-robot interaction and integration with an autonomous mobile platform. More specifically, Spartacus is designed to be a scientific robot reporter, in the sense of a human-robot interaction research assistant. The objective is to have Spartacus provide understandable and configurable interaction, intention and information in unconstrained environmental conditions, reporting its experiences for scientific data analysis.